Material Legacies and Environmental Constraints Underlie Fire Resilience of a Dominant Boreal Forest Type.

Unlabelled: Resilience of plant communities to disturbance is supported by multiple mechanisms, including ecological legacies affecting propagule availability, species' environmental tolerances, and biotic interactions. Understanding the relative importance of these mechanisms for plant community resilience supports predictions of where and how resilience will be altered with disturbance. We tested mechanisms underlying resilience of forests dominated by black spruce () to fire disturbance across a heterogeneous forest landscape in the Northwest Territories, Canada.

Increasing fire and the decline of fire adapted black spruce in the boreal forest.

Intensifying wildfire activity and climate change can drive rapid forest compositional shifts. In boreal North America, black spruce shapes forest flammability and depends on fire for regeneration. This relationship has helped black spruce maintain its dominance through much of the Holocene.

Saved by the Pupillometer! - A role for pupillometry in the acute assessment of patients with traumatic brain injuries?

There is good evidence that pupil reactivity is useful for prognostication in acute head injuries. Despite this, most pupil assessments are subjective and are performed by physicians who may not be experts. They can therefore be unreliable.

Aspirin activates the NF-kappaB signalling pathway and induces apoptosis in intestinal neoplasia in two in vivo models of human colorectal cancer.

Substantial evidence indicates that aspirin has antitumour activity against large bowel cancer and modulation of the NF-kappaB (NF-kappaB) signalling pathway has been identified as a key mechanism in this effect. However, studies examining how aspirin affects the NF-kappaB pathway to promote apoptosis have been restricted to in vitro analysis in tissue culture systems and have produced contrasting results. Here, we employed two animal models of human colorectal cancer to determine aspirin effects on the NF-kappaB pathway in colorectal neoplasia in vivo, and the relationship of such effects to the induction of apoptosis.